


Blessed are the Confused

by hrhrionastar



Series: Blessed Art Thou [1]
Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hrhrionastar/pseuds/hrhrionastar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kahlan has a problem. Luckily she has a sister to go to for help. There may also be an evil chicken ;) </p><p>Written for LotS bingo, for the prompt <i>the Creator</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blessed are the Confused

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning** : pregnancy, discussion of abortion and infanticide; ambiguous powerful magic; material borrowed from the books but twisted to suit the show, including an 'evil chicken'

Kahlan sat with her legs folded under her and her chin propped in her hands. She was leaning on the windowsill, watching Richard and Cara spar in Aydindril's inner courtyard. In theory they were preparing the Home Guard for coming war with the Blood of the Fold. In practice, Kahlan knew well, they were having a bit of shameless fun.  
  
Richard swept under Cara's guard. At the last second she twisted out of the way, so that the Sword of Truth merely brushed past her shoulder. Her hair, still worn loose (in honor of Kahlan, Cara claimed) even though it was getting long enough to braid finally, shone in the sunlight.  
  
Richard parried one of Cara's agiels. His muscles gleamed with sweat.  
  
It was a hot day. Richard had taken his shirt off.  
  
"Kahlan!" someone grabbed Kahlan's hair and pulled her head back far enough that she couldn't see Richard and Cara anymore. She leaned back yet further and caught an upside-down glimpse of her sister Dennee's new face.  
  
"I've been calling your name for the past half candlemark," said Dennee, releasing Kahlan's hair. "What were you thinking about so intently?"  
  
Kahlan shifted guiltily on the window seat. She avoided glancing down to see who was winning Richard and Cara's match only by exercising extreme self-control.  
  
Dennee looked so different in her new body. Yet Kahlan had no trouble reading the expression in her sister's gray eyes as she leaned over Kahlan to peer out the window.  
  
Indulgent tolerance of Richard and Kahlan's 'mutual obsession,' as Cara put it; respect and genuine affection for Richard himself; and wariness combined with remembered pain and fury when Dennee saw Cara.  
  
Kahlan pulled her necklace down from where it had gotten entangled with her hair and studied the pendant. The blue stone reminded Kahlan of the moon, although she couldn't have said why. It was as though the pendant watched her and Richard together the same way the moon had, all those nights on the quest when they were first falling in love.  
  
Kahlan sighed. Sometimes she missed those days. Everything was so simple then.  
  
"What is that?" Dennee slid onto the window seat beside Kahlan and peered at the pendant.  
  
"A wedding gift," said Kahlan. "From Shota."  
  
"How kind," Dennee said.  
  
There was a small silence. Kahlan continued to stare at the blue stone pendant.  
  
"Is that what's bothering you?" asked Dennee.  
  
"What makes you think anything's—" Kahlan began, but her sister interrupted.  
  
"You seem different."  
  
Kahlan let the pendant fall against her chest. It fell directly into the hollow between her breasts, framed by her bodice. Richard didn't like her wearing it that way in public because, he said, it gave people an excuse to stare at her breasts, and anyone with an excuse to admire Kahlan's cleavage wasn't going to look away for hours.  
  
Kahlan liked that Richard was jealous. It made her feel safe to know that he wasn't going to stop loving her because she was a Confessor—or start to, for that matter—and mutual jealousy was surely part of mutual obsession.  
  
Besides, Kahlan didn't actually own any gowns that would have concealed the pendant completely.  
  
At last Kahlan could no longer pretend to be distracted by the pendant. She looked up and met her sister's eyes.  
  
Dennee gazed back, utterly calm.  
  
Kahlan broke first. She always had, even when they were children.  
  
"The pendant is to stop me from conceiving," she explained. "Because Shota believes—she's seen!—that if Richard and I have a child, it'll be a boy."  
  
"And?" asked Dennee.  
  
"And a male Confessor who also possessed the power of the Rahl bloodline—" Kahlan didn't finish, just waved her hands in a gesture of hopelessness.  
  
"Would be a monster," said Dennee. "Yes." She settled back further in the window seat and began kneading her skirt with both hands. "Except—I've thought about this a good deal, Kahlan. When I gave birth to Young Richard and Serena wanted to drown him and I just couldn't make myself agree, I remember asking myself why the Creator would give me such pain. If She didn't want my son in the world, why let him be born? He was healthy. He was perfect. How could it be that nothing good would come of his existence?"  
  
"Oh, Dennee," said Kahlan. She laid her palms over her sister's. There didn't seem to be anything she could say.  
  
Young Richard. Kahlan remembered that. Most male Confessors didn't survive long enough to be named.  
  
Dennee had told her sister before she left for Valeria that she meant to call her son after the Seeker. Kahlan had thought that only Richard would be honored at being a male Confessor's namesake.  
  
"I don't believe it's true that all male Confessors are evil," said Dennee. "The Creator wouldn't give us such a heartbreaking burden, that we must kill our sons. We've done that to ourselves, because 'it's always been done this way' and 'we can't take the risk.'"  
  
She sneered, presumably at the dead Serena and all the other Confessors who'd told her to murder her son.  
  
"But what of Valeria?" said Kahlan. She spoke without thinking, and cursed herself when she saw her sister's face start to crumple.  
  
Dennee stopped before she'd really begun to weep. The brief spasm of pain was gone behind the impenetrable Confessor mask as she turned toward the window again. Kahlan couldn't see from this angle, but it was obvious that Dennee was watching Cara.  
  
"That's why I hate your Mord'Sith friend," Dennee said, quite matter-of-factly. Her voice was lower now than it had been, and Kahlan had to strain her ears to hear it even though they were sitting quite close. "Not for what she did to me. For what she made me do. Because of her, my son is dead at my hands."  
  
Why would the Creator help Richard save Young Richard's life, only to let Cara take it away?  
  
Kahlan knew that good deeds and miracles were because of the Creator, while all evils came from the Keeper. Sometimes it was difficult to know which event was which.  
  
She pulled Dennee closer until her sister's head was against her shoulder. They sat like that for minutes, not speaking.  
  
"When I said 'and,' I meant for you to tell me why you're upset," Dennee said eventually.  
  
Kahlan closed her eyes. "I think I'm with child," she whispered.  
  
'Think' was a lie, of course. Confessors _knew_.  
  
"But you have the magic moon pendant," said Dennee. "And you don't know what to do because Shota told you that the child will be a boy."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Do you think Shota's magic didn't work?"  
  
At that Kahlan opened her eyes. The magic pendant just wasn't what mattered most to her at the moment.  
  
"No," she said. "Although this morning I did see a chicken in the Hall of Judgment acting very strangely—"  
  
"Kahlan."  
  
"It gave me the weirdest look, and then it cackled realllly slowly—"  
  
"Kahlan!"  
  
Kahlan stared at the ceiling. She said nothing.  
  
Dennee sat up straight and glared.  
  
"Did you use the pendant every time you were with Richard?"  
  
"Of course!" Kahlan sounded indignant.  
  
"You can't lie to a Confessor," Dennee pointed out.  
  
Kahlan drew herself up with all the dignity she could. "I am the Mother Confessor," she argued. "I can lie to whomever I choose."  
  
"Except me," finished Dennee.  
  
Kahlan slumped back against the window. She snuck a glance out. Richard and Cara had finished their match. Now Richard was using his shirt to wipe the sweat off his glistening abs.  
  
He was so beautiful. Inside and out. Kahlan was blessed to have his love.  
  
She knew that it was the Creator who had brought them together and protected Richard from her powers, because surely nothing but divine intervention could have saved Richard's soul after all the times Kahlan had put it in danger.  
  
Kahlan knew in her heart that she and Richard were meant to be together. It was why the thought of taking a mate had always terrified her.  
  
"You and I are the last of our kind," she said to Dennee. "We must have children or the Confessors will be gone forever. And I want children. I would want this baby even if I were an ordinary woman living in a cottage somewhere. And I'd want Richard to be the father. It's just—I just wish that for once, things could be easy for us."  
  
"Motherhood is not easy," Dennee contradicted firmly.  
  
Kahlan took out the pendant again and glowered at it. She felt as if its presence gave Shota a window into her conversation, or worse, her mind. Knowing the witch woman, these fears didn't seem entirely irrational.  
  
"Even if you're right and male Confessors don't have to be evil," Kahlan said, "how can I make sure my son is good? Richard told me about a different world. One where I married Darken Rahl."  
  
Kahlan waited while Dennee gasped in horrified sympathy.  
  
"Exactly," she said. "And I had a son. I loved him, but he was a monster."  
  
"And do you think that Darken Rahl was a better father than Richard will be?" asked Dennee shrewdly.  
  
"Of course not!"  
  
Kahlan was shocked out of her depression. Richard was going to be a wonderful father. She knew that in her bones, just like she knew that he would not so much as share her fears for their son's wickedness, because Richard never believed ill of anyone until it was proved they deserved it.  
  
Richard was like the Creator. He always saw the good in people because there _was_ only good in his heart.  
  
Dennee touched the pendant. It didn't reflect light. Instead it seemed to absorb the energy in her fingers. Kahlan watched uneasily.  
  
"How does Richard feel about this?" asked Dennee.  
  
"He says it's my decision," Kahlan said. "But I know he wants children. He doesn't know I'm with child."  
  
"If you shed the babe, he never needs to," said Dennee. She was utterly neutral. Any interpretation Kahlan chose to put on her words would come from Kahlan, not Dennee.  
  
Kahlan admired this technique. It was one she struggled to duplicate in Council meetings.  
  
Kahlan leaned back against the window. She closed her eyes.  
  
She thought about the Creator.  
  
Kahlan had never questioned Her existence. She couldn't even remember a time that she hadn't prayed to the Creator. One said, 'spirits!' and asked them to watch over one, because they could be presumed to have a personal interest in the affairs of the living. But the Creator was always there too, watching over it all with the loving vigilance of a mother.  
  
Was that a fair analogy? What would the Creator do, as a mother?  
  
Kahlan didn't like comparing herself to a god, even if only in the privacy of her own head. She felt tiny beside the Creator.  
  
And not tiny at all compared with Maia. Had she really been the Creator in human form? Or was she merely an instrument of the Creator's will, like Kahlan? Who had fought hard, and still fought, to turn herself into as perfect an instrument as possible.  
  
What Kahlan wanted, she realized, was guidance. A sign. Something to help her choose which part of herself to betray.  
  
Dennee had said, "It's always been done this way." She had quoted Alana, and Serena, and Confessors for hundreds of years.  
All that history had a good deal of weight.  
  
There remained the uncertainty of Shota's predictions. But she was right more often than she was wrong.  
  
It had always been done this way for a reason.  
  
Kahlan opened her eyes. She felt no closer to a decision.  
  
The moon pendant glowed suddenly bright on Kahlan's chest. It looked like the tiny blue stone had stolen the afternoon sunlight outside. It felt like magic.  
  
Kahlan was sure that Shota was going to speak through the pendant. There could be no other explanation for the strange light, surely.  
  
She and Dennee stared at it together.  
  
Nothing happened.  
  
Kahlan's eyes started to water.  
  
The light intensified in a brief starburst of painful beauty and then winked out.  
  
Kahlan blinked furiously. The pendant was still there, resting against her heart. It was quite cool to the touch. She yanked it off, over her hair, and stared at it through smarting eyes. A black spot hovered nearby, but Kahlan was fairly certain that was her vision, not the magic pendant.  
  
"Odd," said Dennee. Her tone was deliberately casual. She said nothing else.  
  
Kahlan closed her fingers over the pendant. It had interesting properties, and it had been a gift. She might as well keep it.  
  
"So," said Dennee. "Was there really a chicken in the Hall of Judgment? What was it doing there?"  
  
"Oh, probably wanted to cackle at me for hours about better feeding grounds, the right to fly directly through Aydindril without a transport tax, that sort of thing."  
  
Kahlan spoke almost at random at first, but by the time she'd finished her eyes were dancing with suppressed laughter.  
  
"I suppose the creature heard that the Mother Confessor had returned," agreed Dennee. She was smiling now too. "Flew in through a window, or hopped several halls? Perhaps it plotted its approach for weeks, and here you just left the Hall of Judgment without a second thought—"  
  
"I've had plenty of second thoughts, just not about chickens," Kahlan returned. "Although it's somewhat disturbing to think of the animal lying in wait for the Mother Confessor."  
  
"Maybe it's an _evil_ chicken," suggested Dennee.  
  
She'd somehow managed to keep both face and voice totally under control. But Kahlan still saw her laughing.  
  
"You'll have to kill it, of course," Dennee added.  
  
Kahlan stretched her arms over her head, still holding the moon pendant clutched in one fist. "Oh," she said lightly, "I think I'll let Richard take care of this one."  
  
"Seeker versus chicken," Dennee intoned. "His greatest battle."  
  
"Dennee!" Kahlan protested this making light of her husband. "Richard will be protected by his pure heart. And the Creator's blessing."  
  
Dennee rose in an elegant swirl of skirts. She kissed Kahlan's forehead.  
  
"Be well, big sister," she said.  
  
Kahlan swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded. In that moment she knew that the gift she was most grateful for of all that the Creator had given her was her sister.  
  
"We should have chicken tonight," said Dennee, grinning. "I'll speak to the cook."  
  
Kahlan laughed.  
  


* * *

  
  
Nine months later Richard and Kahlan had a son. He was born on Creatormas.  
  
His aunt Cara and his aunt Dennee met him together. Both swore to protect him from all perils including his own nature.  
  
"I know Confessors," said Dennee.  
  
"I know monsters," said Cara.  
  
Shota was not invited to the naming ceremony.  
  
Kahlan would have called a daughter Dennee. She and Richard named their son Michael.


End file.
